[Dialogue] Congress Tells Auditor in Iraq to Close Office

[Harry Wainwright]

Published on Friday, November 3, 2006 by the New York
<http://www.nytimes.com>  Times 

Congress Tells Auditor in Iraq to Close Office 

by James Glanz 

 

Investigations led by a Republican lawyer named Stuart W. Bowen Jr. in Iraq
have sent American occupation officials to jail on bribery and conspiracy
charges, exposed disastrously poor construction work by well-connected
companies like Halliburton and Parsons, and discovered that the military did
not properly track hundreds of thousands of weapons it shipped to Iraqi
security forces. 

And tucked away in a huge military authorization bill that President Bush
signed two weeks ago is what some of Mr. Bowen's supporters believe is his
reward for repeatedly embarrassing the administration: a pink slip.

The order comes in the form of an obscure provision that terminates his
federal oversight agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for
Iraq Reconstruction, on Oct. 1, 2007. The clause was inserted by the
Republican side of the House Armed Services Committee over the objections of
Democratic counterparts during a closed-door conference, and it has
generated surprise and some outrage among lawmakers who say they had no idea
it was in the final legislation.

Mr. Bowen's office, which began operation in January 2004 to examine
reconstruction money spent in Iraq, was always envisioned as a temporary
organization, permitted to continue its work only as long as Congress saw
fit. Some advocates for the office, in fact, have regarded its lack of a
permanent bureaucracy as the key to its aggressiveness and independence. 

But as the implications of the provision in the new bill have become clear,
opposition has been building on both sides of the political aisle. One point
of contention is exactly when the office would have naturally run its course
without a hard end date. 

The bipartisan opposition may not be unexpected given Mr. Bowen's Republican
credentials - he served under George W. Bush both in Texas and in the White
House - and deep public skepticism on the Bush administration's conduct of
the war.

Susan Collins, a Maine Republican who followed the bill closely as
chairwoman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government
Affairs, says that she still does not know how the provision made its way
into what is called the conference report, which reconciles differences
between House and Senate versions of a bill.

Neither the House nor the Senate version contained such a termination clause
before the conference, all involved agree.

"It's truly a mystery to me," Ms. Collins said. "I looked at what I thought
was the final version of the conference report and that provision was not in
at that time."

"The one thing I can confirm is that this was a last-minute insertion," she
said.

A Republican spokesman for the committee, Josh Holly, said lawmakers should
not have been surprised by the provision closing the inspector general's
office because it "was discussed very early in the conference process."

But like several other members of the House and Senate who were contacted on
the bill, Ms. Collins said that she feared the loss of oversight that could
occur if the inspector general's office went out of business, adding that
she was already working on legislation with several Democratic and
Republican senators to reverse the termination.

One of those, John W. Warner, the Virginia Republican who is chairman of the
powerful Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a statement that Mr. Bowen
was "making a valuable contribution to the Congressional and public
understanding of this very complex and ever-changing situation in Iraq."

"Given that his office has performed important work and that much remains to
be done," Mr. Warner added, "I intend to join Senator Collins in consulting
with our colleagues to extend his charter."

While Senators Collins and Warner said they had nothing more than hunches on
where the impetus for setting a termination date had originated,
Congressional Democrats were less reserved.

"It appears to me that the administration wants to silence the messenger
that is giving us information about waste and fraud in Iraq," said
Representative Henry A. Waxman, a California Democrat who is the ranking
minority member of the House Committee on Government Reform.

"I just can't see how one can look at this change without believing it's
political," he said.

The termination language was inserted into the bill by Congressional staff
members working for Duncan Hunter, the California Republican who is the
chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and who declared on Monday
that he plans to run for president in 2008.

Mr. Holly, who is the House Armed Services spokesman as well as a member of
Mr. Hunter's staff, said that politics played no role and that there had
been no direction from the administration or lobbying from the companies
whose work in Iraq Mr. Bowen's office has severely critiqued. Three of the
companies that have been a particular focus of Mr. Bowen's investigations,
Halliburton, Parsons and Bechtel, said that they had made no effort to lobby
against his office.

The idea, Mr. Holly said, was simply to return to a non-wartime footing in
which inspectors general in the State Department, the Pentagon and elsewhere
would investigate American programs overseas. The definite termination date
was also seen as helpful for planning future oversight efforts from Bush
administration agencies, he said.

But in Congress, particularly on the Democratic side of the aisle, there
have long been accusations that agencies controlled by the Bush
administration are not inclined to unearth their own shortcomings in the
first place.

The criticism came to a head in a hearing a year ago, when Representative
Dennis J. Kucinich, an Ohio Democrat, induced the Pentagon's acting
inspector general, Thomas Gimble, to concede that he had no agents deployed
in Iraq, more than two years after the invasion.

A spokesman for the Pentagon inspector general said Thursday that Mr. Gimble
had worked to improve that situation, and currently had seven auditors in
Baghdad and others working on Iraq-related issues in the United States and
elsewhere. Mr. Gimble was in Iraq on Thursday, the spokesman said.

Mr. Bowen's office has 55 auditors and inspectors in Iraq and about 300
reports and investigations already to its credit, far outstripping any other
oversight agency in the country.

But Howard Krongard, the State Department inspector general, said that the
comparison was misleading, because many of those resources would probably
flow to State and the Pentagon if Congress shuts Mr. Bowen's office down.

"I think we are competitive to do what they ask us to do," Mr. Krongard
said, referring to Congress.

Mr. Kucinich and other lawmakers said that Iraq oversight could also be hurt
by the loss of Mr. Bowen's mandate, which allows him to cross institutional
boundaries, while the other inspectors general have jurisdictions only
within their own agencies. Mr. Krongard said that issue could be handled by
cooperation among the inspectors general.

Officials at the State Department and the Pentagon made it clear that in
general terms they supported Mr. Bowen's work and would abide by the wishes
of Congress.

While the quality of Mr. Bowen's work is seldom questioned, he is sometimes
accused of being a grandstander who is too friendly with the news media. Mr.
Bowen has responded that it is standard procedure to publicize successful
investigations as a way of discouraging other potential wrongdoers.

Among the disagreements on the termination language in the defense
authorization bill was exactly how much it would have shortened Mr. Bowen's
tenure. An amendment in the Senate version of the bill actually expanded the
pot of reconstruction money his agents could examine.

Because the tenure of his office is calculated through a formula involving
the amount of reconstruction money in that pot, the crafters of that
amendment figured that it would have extended Mr. Bowen's work until well
into 2008 - or longer if Congress granted further extensions.

Mr. Holly agrees that the Senate language would have expanded that pot of
money, but he says that in the Republican staff's interpretation of the
formula, Mr. Bowen's tenure would have run out sometime in 2007 whether the
money was added or not.

In any case, as the bill came out of conference, the termination date of
Oct. 1, 2007, was inserted, effectively meaning that Mr. Bowen would have to
start working on passing his responsibilities to other agencies by early
next year.

Capitol Hill staff members said that after House Democratic objections were
overridden, Senate conferees agreed to the provision in a bit of
horse-trading: the amount of money Mr. Bowen could look at would be
expanded, but only with the hard termination date.

Mr. Bowen himself declined to comment on the controversy surrounding his
office, saying only that he was already working with the other inspectors
general to develop a transition plan in accordance with the defense
authorization act. "We will do what the Congress desires," Mr. Bowen said. 

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

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